<p>I have seen on college confidential, including the Cornell Board, a sincere worship of the gods of USNWR and Businessweek rankings. It is disconcerting to see how many prospective students are deterred by how "relatively poor" we do on some of these rankings, and how many students who could care less about Cornell apply because they see we ranked in the top 10 for so and so program.</p>
<p>Let me implore you to read more about these rankings, especially the methodologies, before using them as any source of credible metric for judgment.</p>
<p>USNWR and Businessweek are magazines, which in case you have forgotten, are for profit businesses. Their primary objective is selling magazines, not providing an objective and accurate rating system for colleges. Take a look at their methodology and you can see that.</p>
<p>The first, and most highly weighted statistic for USNWR, the "peer assessment score". "The U.S. News ranking formula gives greatest weight to the opinions of those in a position to judge a school's undergraduate academic excellence. The peer assessment survey allows the top academics we consultpresidents, provosts, and deans of admissionsto account for intangibles such as faculty dedication to teaching. Each individual is asked to rate peer schools' academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Those who don't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly are asked to mark "don't know." Synovate, an opinion-research firm based near Chicago, in spring 2008 collected the data; of the 4,272 people who were sent questionnaires, 46 percent responded."</p>
<p>I am not sure that presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions of other schools know enough of the intricacies of any school to provide an accurate assessment of them. How would a dean of admission at school Alpha know about the "faculty dedication to teaching" at school Beta? On top of that, do you not think that the administrators at other colleges are strategic and calculating in their responses to these surveys? They know by trashing another school their ranking will go up, and they will have more applications and more money flowing through their school, and they use this information accordingly.</p>
<p>Second, "Retention (20 percent in national universities and liberal arts colleges and 25 percent in master's and baccalaureate colleges). The higher the proportion of freshmen who return to campus the following year and eventually graduate, the better a school is apt to be at offering the classes and services students need to succeed. This measure has two components: six-year graduation rate (80 percent of the retention score) and freshman retention rate (20 percent). The graduation rate indicates the average proportion of a graduating class who earn a degree in six years or less; we consider freshman classes that started from 1998 through 2001. Freshman retention indicates the average proportion of freshmen entering from 2003 through 2006 who returned the following fall."</p>
<p>For any rigorous university like Cornell, you will inevitably have lower retention rates than are "desirable" by USNWR. Your classes are meant to grade your merit of the material, and if you cannot stay up to par with the difficulty level of the classes here, you will be asked to kindly leave. Cornell is not meant to baby students with grade inflation, nor to hand out a degree to every person who walks through its doors, this is a place that unabashedly teaches and trains people for the work force and for life. </p>
<p>I will spare you all the counterpoints to every one of these metrics, but I ask of you to go through them with a discerning eye, and ask yourself whether each of these is valid in its assessments. Do not blindly accept these rankings as the truth, do your own research, and formulate your own opinions.</p>
<p>How</a> We Calculate the Rankings - US News and World Report</p>